livingincoronavirusworld 106: ...stronger than the weakness of those who create them...

7/8

Morningside

Our underground session has a couple of major themes this week.  One of course is response to the recent live streaming of Hamilton. We are in agreement that it is more about the future than the past.

Steve P compares it to I and II Chronicles…a rather late  telling o the David story. (C. 400BCE?)  Telling of the story as it might have been had we done it right….The characters in Hamilton being like grafittied statues.  As for me it was a never was pointing towards a could be…

We talked about statues. And iconoclasm. Outrage replacing conversation. That statues can be like Greek Orthodox icons that you look through in order to see into another world, or simply deeper reality.  And the difference between icons and idols. Icons never become the object of worship, they always point towards…

Steve reminds us of Willam Sloane Coffin, Jr.s three kinds of patriotism:

* Loveless criticism

* Uncritical love

* Lovers quarrel

Obviously it was the last he called us to.

We spent a lot of time exploring a house metaphor for our country. Steve H, typically saying we all live in the same house and need to figure out how to get along. Steve P arguing that many don’t see it that way. That they are in the house and the rest in, at best, the out house. 

Dre wants to explore the work of forgiveness and how that fits into Black Lives Matter. Which leads into my differentiation between forgiveness and reconciliation. That as  friend once said, no hay reconciliation sin reconstruction,  there is no reconciliation without reconstruction. And as another friend once said, Forgiveness is giving up for all time the hope of a different past.

One of the issues standing in the way of effective forgiveness is our own capacity for forgiving ourselves, including denial. 

I recommend  Simon Wiesentahl's "The Sunflower: the limits and possibilities of forgiveness..."

Stephen H has been to spend a night with “Occupy City Hall,” which started out as an extension of the Black Lives Matter protest and now has evolved in broader, less focused ways. And it the moment, they seem ready to live out the whole tragic history of  Occupy Wall Street like a binged TV series. 

We finish with the words from the Declaration of Independence, “…all men are created equal..endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…” To this, as to Hamilton, I say, art, and ideas..are stronger than the weakness of those who create them.

I walk past the  St.James Gate, our favorite gathering place, closed these many months. Dion and David and a work crew are hard at work under the direction of Paul the owner aiming for some kind fo reopening. How any bar/restaurants have survived is a mystery.  

Teddy's still here, but not for long....

I continue down 81st to the Museum of Natural History to check on the status of the Teddy Roosevelt statue, with its paternalistic imagery due for removal. He’s still there, but protected by a contingent of police to keep him safe until he leaves. 

Getting the Gate ready...

My friend Heide Hatry, who creates portraits out of cremation ashes,(https://www.heidehatry.com/icons_art.html) in a  dialogue with an art historian who has focused on reliquaries, those art works constructed to house some particle of a blessed saint’s body. At some point, I thrill to see the connection between Heide’s work and reliquaries. Though her work is entitled “icons in ash,” they aren’t exactly icons because they actually contain part of the subject.

There is much to talk about since so many deaths went unrecognized during the pandemic, many people  had no way to say goodbye. So much left unsaid, untouched, undone. We are a very long way from resolution.